Hasta La Vista?

FRANK J. OHLHORST

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Can be reached at (516) 562-7455 or via e-mail at [email protected].

Vista is expected to come in many flavors—a version for home users, a version for small business, a version for the enterprise, and so on. All of those version choices will surely add to the confusion. Add to that a new interface—Avalon—as well as changes to security, policy management and storage subsystems, and you will have many people scratching their heads wondering if Vista is the way to go.

It seems that Microsoft&'s biggest challenge to getting Vista out there will be corporate IT departments. Microsoft needs to come up with a believable business case to get corporations to consider upgrading. The company will tout security as a reason, but in reality, Windows XP has been around for four years, and most corporations have addressed all of the major security issues and are willing to rely on in-place technologies.

Microsoft also will try to build a case around the intuitiveness of Avalon, but it is likely that Avalon will be back-ported to Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. Ditto for Indigo, Microsoft&'s new take on Web services communications.

What&'s more, the new Rich Internet Application development models using AJAX, Flash, widgets and Web objects are making the underlying operating systems less important. As those new types of applications gain market share, IT departments will need to only focus on browser technology. That begs the question: Do you need a Microsoft operating system at all? The simple answer is no—Linux, FreeBSD and Macintosh offer browsers compatible with Rich Internet Application technology.

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Currently, a Microsoft operating system is only required for running Windows applications. As those applications move over to Rich Internet Application models, the argument for Vista becomes weaker. Add to that the latest in desktop virtualization technology, and Windows can be relegated to a guest operating system, only needed to run those non-Rich Internet Application models.

Perhaps 2006 will become the year of Linux on the desktop. Only time will tell.

What's your take on Vista? Call me at (516) 562-7455 or vis e-mail at [email protected]